Cockpit Easy and Web Administration of Linux

Cockpit is a web application that provides easy administration for Linux servers. It is mainly developed for Fedora but other distributions are OK too. Latest Cockpit version is 118 as writing this article.

Features:

Cockpit provides easy container management

Storage administration

Network configuration

Inspection of logs etc.

Zero footprint and very little resource consumption.

Installing Cockpit

We will install cockpit for Fedora 24 but it is similar for other distributions.

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# dnf install cockpit -y

Failed toset locale,defaulting toC

Fedora24-x86_64-Updates2.0MB/s|17MB00:08

Last metadata expiration check::00:09ago on Sat Oct805:51:012016.

Dependencies resolved.

Starting Cockpit

We can start Cockpit different way but the most easy and convenient way is using systemctl .

Here is the login screen we can login by using our root system credentials.

Welcome screen is here we can see that there is a simple dashboard about the cpu, memory, disk i/o and network.

Services and Targets

Listing services installed on the system can be done with services menu from the left colon.

If we click a services we can see details of the services. If the service is started and active. We can start/stop services from this page too or we can enable/disable for the system startup. We can see that logs lays along the below of the page.

Logs

We can list system logs from Logs. Logs are listed according to their level like Errors, Warning, Notices. We can also filter logs according to their dates.

User Management

User can be listed With Tools->Accounts menu. Existing users can be edited or new user can be added.

Also users full names and roles can be changed.

Terminal (The Best Feature)

The best feature for me is the terminal interface. We can use this system without any ssh/telnet/rdp/vnc or similar service. We just need an web interface that is enough.